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On October 26th Hindus all over the world will be celebrating one of their most important festivals of the year: Diwali. Also known as the Festival of Lights, Diwali involves the lighting of small clay lamps filled with oil to signify the triumph of good over evil. To Hindus, darkness represents ignorance, and light is a metaphor for knowledge. Lighting a lamp symbolizes the destruction, through knowledge, of all negative forces. Diwali is celebrated by Hindus of all ages and during the festival celebrants wear new clothes and share sweets and snacks with family members and friends.

If you are looking for children’s books about Diwali check out Chad Stephenson’s Personal View piece Diwali: The Hindu Festival of Lights, and the following PaperTigers’ blog posts:

Poetry Friday: About Diwali and its Poetic Origins in the Ramayana

Happy Diwali!

Diwali, Festival of Lights

Shortly we will be moving on to a new update on the main PaperTigers website – but, of course, there’s still time to explore Children’s Literature from India and the Indian diaspora, if you haven’t already, and the features will remain readily available via the permalink to the October/November homepage.

And just to remind you of the wealth of resources and sheer joyful reading out there, here’s a glimpse at some recent blog posts from that rich and varied Indian diaspora, as well as India itself:

Find reviews of Signature: Patterns in Gond Art, edited by Gita Wolf, Bhajju Shyam and Jonathan Yamakami (Tara Books, 2010) and The Yellow Bird by Lila Majumdar, illustrated by Ajanta Guhathakurta and translated by Kamala Chatterjee over at Saffron Tree. Both books sound and look wonderful…

Read this post from author Uma Krishnaswami, in which she muses on cultural perspectives, and on making unfamiliar words clear through their context in a story…

Mitali Perkins is (sort of) on her winter break from her blog (her back-posts are still worth perusing, though) BUT you can read a new interview with her over at Color on Line, conducted by Tarie of Asia in the Heart, World on the Mind…

A recent post on Pratham Books’ blog, Revamping Mythological and Traditional Indian Stories, will be of particular interest to graphic novel fans; and they also have lots of news and photos from the recent Bookaroo in the City festival in New Delhi…

This month’s PaperTigers issue is all about India.  I recently stumbled on a great graphic novel resource for young people about what it is like being an Indian American visiting India for the first time.  The book is called Indian by Choice by Amit Dasgupta, Art by Neelabh (Wisdom Tree, 2009.)   Mandy is a second generation Indian American, born and raised in Chicago.   Because of unforeseen family events (his mother has been in an accident), Mandy must go to India alone for the wedding of his cousin Gurinder in Delhi.  His trip is for four weeks and he is unsure and tentative about the whole thing.   Beginning with the flight, he is amongst other Indians and Indian Americans, one of whom sitting beside him questions Mandy aggressively about his name: “Mandy?  Arrey dost, Mandeep kaho na, ya Maninder.  What is this Mandy nonsense?”  Of course, Mandy knows his name is short for ‘Mandeep’ but as far as he is concerned he is “Mandy” all the way.

Although Mandy does not have a very good attitude towards visiting his parents’ homeland, luckily his relatives are a warm, loving and hospitable bunch.   And it is this aspect of the book that I found most rewarding to read about.  I remember my own first time adult visit to Japan in high school.   The hospitality shown to me by my extended family there made me both proud of and more curious about my Japanese heritage.

The Indian diaspora is huge.  In Canada, we refer to Indians from the subcontinent as either Indo-Canadian or South Asian.  Indo Canadians have a long history in Canada and also come from all parts of India as well as neighboring Pakistan.   Mandy’s story, I’m sure, will certainly not be unfamiliar to many!  Although I have read books written by authors of Indian descent about their cultural identities, this is the first time I’ve seen a book published on the topic from an Indian press which makes Indian by Choice rather unique.   The story is also told in an amalgam of graphics, e-mail texts and photographs which makes for a different style of presentation — a style I’m not entirely sold on, but found nontheless intriguing to look at and read.   At the back of the book is an informative essay containing some interesting facts about India and the Indian diaspora by author Amit Dasgupta who is himself, an Indian diplomat.

This year the Hindu festival of Diwali is from Nov. 5-9.   Today marks its beginning.  I first heard about the festival from watching a National Film Board film called Lights for Gita in their Talespinners Collection (a series of short films for 5-9 year olds.)  In this story, eight year old Gita, who lives in Montreal is excited about celebrating Diwali in her new country, but something unexpected happens — an ice storm knocks out power in the city.  What will Gita do?  Will this holiday celebrated with lights now be ruined for  her?  Check out the DVD by ordering it, or finding it at your local library!

PaperTigers with its focus on India this issue has a number of book suggestions about Diwali given in a revisited Personal Views article by Chad Stephenson.  Pooja Makhijani also refers to Diwali in her Personal Views article entitled “A String of Bright Lights.”  She mentions her Diwali book picks in a post she did for the children’s lit blog Chicken Spaghetti awhile back.  In her post, she mentions how in northern India, Diwali is a celebration of the homecoming of Ram whose story can be found in her suggested picture book title Rama and the Demon King: An Ancient Tale from India by Jessica Souhami.  I found Souhami’s book at my local library; it was a bilingual one in Somali and English!   The story of Rama is found in the Hindu text The Ramayana which is a 24, 000 couplet poem written in Sanskrit by Valmiki around 300 B.C.   My daughter’s view of this ancient story of Rama was rather quaint; she said she liked stories where the good guy (Rama) and a bad guy (Ravanna) fight it out over a woman (Sita)  — although in this case, the bad guy is terrifying ten-headed demon!

Hope you have a happy Diwali this year!  Poetry Friday is hosted by JoAnn at Teaching Authors.

E-books and children’s book-based apps for mobile devices are no doubt popular these days and have been reaching many millions of children worldwide. While reading the reprint of a recent article on Pratham Books‘ website about the release of the iPad in India, I discovered that the following Pratham and Tulika books (since our current focus is India) are available as e-book apps:

By Pratham Books – free download:

-Annual Haircut Day (English) – A cumulative tale about a man with very long hair who can’t seem to find anyone to cut it.

-Chand Ka Tohfa – An attempt to creatively use technology to combine regional language exposure and entertainment.

By Tulika -

Ekki Dokki (English/Hindi)- A story based on an endearing Marathi folktale about two sisters—one who has only one strand of hair on her head, and one who has two—and what happens to them when they meet an old woman who lives alone in the middle of the forest.

The Runnaway Peppercorn (Tamil/English or Hindi/English) – Amminikutty Amma picks out the last peppercorn from her spice box to make some tasty onion chutney. But little Kurumolagu (the peppercorn) has no intention of being ground and eaten just yet. With a desperate Amminikutty Amma hot on his heels, he hops, jumps, skids, brakes, revs and races his way away.

In addition to making possible to switch between two languages on any page, these apps also allow voice-over recording, so that children can listen to the story, for instance, in grandma’s voice. If I ever needed to be convinced of the positive side of e-book apps, I’m now completely sold on the idea! I can’t wait to record my mom’s voice reading some books in Portuguese to my daughter! I think that adding grandma’s voice to our bedtime routine will help bridge the great distance between the US and Brazil.

Some of the new apps coming out these days include interactive elements and moving illustrations, resulting in something that’s more animated than an e-book and more interactive than a cartoon. And why not pull all stops to bring children and reading together? There seems to be room and reason (and rhyme too!) for all approaches. Many publishers and digital media developers have fully embraced the opportunity to reach out to readers.

Speaking of new technologies, Marjorie got a taste of a very interesting one while we were in Bologna this year…

In Malathi Michelle Iyengar’s picture book Romina’s Rangoli, Romina, a half-Indian and half-Mexican girl born in the United States, is struggling with a school assignment that requires students to “create something that represents your ancestors, your family, and where you come from. Something that represents your heritage.” She can’t seem to come up with a project that will blend her two cultures – that is, until Mr. Gonzalez, her Mexican neighbor, compares her rangoli patterns, drawn with colorful chalk on the sidewalk, and traditionally used in India to decorate houses, the entrance of temples and courtyards, to the symmetrical patterns of papel picado (cut-paper art), a Mexican folk art tradition.

To the teacher and students’ surprise, since they were expecting to see something hanging on the wall, Romina displays her project on the classroom floor, rangoli-style. She explains: “You, see, in India this design would be made of different colored flower petals, or dyed rice-flour, or colored chalk. But mine is made of cut paper, papel picado. My project is both Indian and Mexican, combined. Just like me!” (read the complete review here).

In her personal view article for PaperTigers, titled Hybridity in Literature and Life, the author writes:

When writing Romina’s Rangoli, I struggled with wanting to make the story simple enough to engage and entertain very small children, while at the same time trying NOT to promote the kind of simplistic thinking that reduces “culture” to food and holidays – i.e., Romina is Indian and Mexican, so that means she makes rangoli designs and papel picado. I have often wondered whether Romina’s craft project isn’t too pat, too simple of an ending. But in a society that still tells us, most of the time, to “Check only one box,” the very fact that we multi-ethnic folks actually exist is news to many children. Hopefully, as children get older, they will begin to explore with intellectual rigor the subtle complexities of what culture means in people’s lives, and how various cultural influences converge in family life.

It is common knowledge that children who attend school have a better chance of developing into their full potential and bringing about change in their communities. It’s hard to believe that, in this day and age, so many of the world’s children still aren’t given the opportunity of an education.

Dedicated to “all children who dream of going to school”, Going to School in India is a celebration of what school can be and mean to children. It shows and tells about all kinds of kids—from street kids to kids who go to government and community schools—and how they “climb into school buses, sit on each other’s laps in cycle rickshaws, walk along the edges of mountains, cross scorching deserts on rickety bicycles, swing across rivers on dangling swings-just to get to school.” A festive celebration of formal and informal school settings in India—and of the ways children get to them—this book also reminds us that, while millions of children do get to go to school each day, millions of others don’t.

Published by Shakti for Children (now Global Fund for Children Books) in partnership with Charlesbridge, Going to School in India (2005) is written by Lisa Heydlauff, with photos by Nitin Upadhye, and designed by B.M. Kamath. Royalties from the sale of the book support educational initiatives in India. Click here to learn more about author Lisa Heydlauff’s projects and her Going to School non-profit.

On a related note, in her 2009 interview for PaperTigers, Maya Ajmera, founder and president of the Global Fund for Children talked about the “moment of obligation” she experienced, over 20 years ago, when she stepped out onto a bustling train platform in India and came across an open-air classroom where children were being taught how to read and write—a moment that led her to start The Global Fund for Children. This anecdote illustrates what our Pacific Rim Voices executive director, Peter Coughlan, loves to say: “A ripple can become a tidal wave, an acorn an oak tree.” GFC nowadays reaches millions of children and youth around the world, and supports hundreds of educational projects, including mobile boat schools for children in Bangladesh, night classes for women and girls in the red light districts of India, and countless more.

A ripple can indeed turn into a tidal wave of goodness.

You may have seen our review of Seaglass Summer, by Anjali Banerjee among the reviews recently added to PaperTigers as part of our focus on children’s literature from India and the Indian diaspora. If not, here it is.

After reading it, make sure to check out Uma Krishnaswami’s metafictional interview with Poppy, the book’s eleven-year-old protagonist. The fact that Uma read drafts of the novel before it was published gave her a privileged perspective on the character’s evolution from idea to full development. Uma’s interview questions prompt Poppy to reveal how she and her story changed in the process of being written.

What a fun way to get some insight into an author’s creative process! That’s what I call giving voice to a character!…

Does anyone know of other interviews with book characters (keeping in mind our focus on multicultural children’s and ya books)? I know Uma also did one with Amadi, the Nigerian boy from Katia Novet Saint- Lot’s picture book, Amadi’s Snowman… If you’re aware of any others, do let us know!